"why do we even write music anyway"

I'm going to see if I can come around to where my thoughts are taking me, starting with where they are –

Yesterday was my 43rd birthday. Larry and I spent our celebratory dinner talking through everything we'd learned about cognition and pedagogy, to wit:

• If you want to solve a problem, it has to be your problem to solve
• If you want to solve a problem, you have to deal with the most pressing problem first (or find a way to put a pin in the more pressing problem so you can temporarily focus on something else)
• If you want to solve a problem, it's best to solve it in order, without leaving unsolved or unknown bits behind in your hurry to work ahead

We also started talking about the idea that you have to set aside separate times for making choices and executing choices, in the sense that truly truly truly thinking may take open-ended concentration and truly truly truly transforming your thoughts into action may also take open-ended concentration and these two tasks don't work as well when they're jumbled up.

(This is, incidentally, why both schools and jobs demoralize.)

(Or, at least, one of the reasons why.)

Which, okay, I have my audition set prepared for tonight's audition class, and I am working on my section of "Now/Later/Soon" for this week's voice lesson and this month's cabaret, and I continued my work on the Bach Sinfonia in C Major with the idea that I would prepare it for this Sunday's Unitarian service, and it became obvious that I would not be able to complete the work in enough time.

The time pressure itself may have had something to do with it, although when I set myself the goal of learning the Bach Invention in C Major in an afternoon I had no problem achieving it, and so of course I thought that a week would be more than enough time to learn the Sinfonia and play them as prelude/postlude.

I mean, I got the first chunk in about a half hour.

And then the second chunk got a lot harder.

It's also complicated by the fact that I don't have a decent score to learn from, I printed out a blurry IMSLP copy with no fingering, and then I did the thing where I found a YouTube video where they put up the score while they play the piece, and that version had fingering, and so I'm pausing every few bars and trying to memorize what's on the screen as quickly as I can.

Which, you know, this is no way to learn music.

The score that helped me learn the Invention in an afternoon was also annotated, in the sense that the teacher who had prepared it included not only fingering but also little notes on when the motive was inverted and so on, which added context to the piece, making it more specific and thus easier to learn. Once it became obvious that this note could only be this note because this group of notes could only be this group of notes and they could only be fingered in this particular way, the piece itself was extremely easy to memorize.

(I still need to write this teacher and thank her.)

And yes, I could break down the Sinfonia myself, it would be a very good way for me to understand and solve its problems, but I can't do that by Sunday.

Meanwhile, my mother sent me the one thing I had asked for as a birthday present, which was a copy of Robert Vandall's Preludes.

I do not remember precisely when the Preludes came into my life. It seems like one of them might have been printed in one of those piano magazines that my mother always got, the kind of thing that has two or three articles and then twenty-five pages of catalog, and every issue would feature a piece that might interest the contemporary piano teacher and/or their students, and one of them might have been a Vandall prelude.

I do remember that those pieces were mine, which is to say I knew instantly that I would learn them and that they would become part of my long-term repertoire.

Which, you know, I understand that these are not the kinds of pieces we're going to take with us to Mars. They aren't likely to be performed a hundred years from now. No musician has ever sat down and recorded them, the way William Bolcom sat down to record Robert Schumann's Album for the Young.

And yet I absolutely, ridiculously, love them.

The hemiola in No. 2 in D Major; the use of the E in No. 4 in F Major, which is one of those bits of music that makes my skin shiver. The ascending modulations in No. 8 in C# Minor ("C# minor is kind of the coolest key," as Dave Malloy wrote) which feels just about as close to the glory of the mathematical universe as anything can get.

And of course No. 15 in C Minor. I mean, you know – well, you probably don't know, because nobody has ever recorded these except for the version that Scott Price did for Alfred Music, and you can only hear those if you buy the Alfred copy and set up an account with Alfred and put in your special code, bleh bleh bleh bleh.

The copy my mom sent me for my birthday was the Alfred copy with the code, and part of me was kind of hoping she would send me the copy I learned from as a child because that copy had a simple cover with black type and a cube made of cubes and signified, to the young Nicole, that this was serious music.

The Alfred copy I got in the mail had three never-before-published Preludes, finishing the 24-piece set, but the dreadful cover signified that this was pedagogical music. Disposable. Not the kind of thing you'd ever want to put into your long-term repertoire.

When I became a church organist the first time around, I played many of the Preludes as service music. The first time I played No. 6 in A Major on the organ (because it works just as well on organ as it does on the piano, give it a try) they asked me if I could play that one again, maybe not as soon as possible but at least a few times a year.

So obviously as soon as I realized that I would not be able to learn the Sinfonia in time for this Sunday – which may or may not have coincided with receiving this birthday gift in the mail – I was all guess what, change of plans, we're doing No. 2 and No. 6 for prelude and postlude, meanwhile I'm going to get a library card with the university library so I can find a copy of the Bach that isn't on FRLAKSDJCVUIEHGB YOUTUBE.

And yes yes yes yes yes yes yes I know that Bach is better for every definition of better I've already set for myself, which is to say that each composition contains unique, integrated information and it presents that information in a way that allows both the listener and the performer to learn something new every time.

Vandall's work also contains unique, integrated information, but I suspect there's a limit to how much you can learn from it.

The reason it works as church music is exactly the same reason it works as pedagogical music, which is to say it presents these musical ideas that young pianists and all-ages congregants may never have heard before. It takes you out of the world of hymnals and Faber books and places you somewhere adjacent but new.

And Vandall said himself that he wrote these pieces to keep students playing the piano, trying to reach them at the age at which they might otherwise decide to quit – and although quitting was never an option for me because my mother was the piano teacher, I can absolutely certify that these books of Preludes with their iterated cube covers kept me interested in the piano at an age when I might otherwise have just gone through the motions.

One of the reasons I'm writing MELISANDE is to take student theater out of the world of "Broadway Musical Jr." and place it somewhere more interesting.

I'm also deliberately writing the accompaniment for two pianos because I'm thinking specifically of those preteen and teenage pianists who might be thinking about quitting.

(This is all part of my doomed campaign to keep pit orchestras alive, but that's another story.)

But I'm also trying to make MELISANDE serious music, not a pedagogical exercise. When Vandall said he wrote No. 2 to teach students about hemiolas it broke my middle-aged heart, because first of all I already knew about hemiolas when I was a child (thanks, WEST SIDE STORY) and second of all it felt like being secretly fed medicine instead of getting the chance to play real music from a real book that had absolutely nothing to do with Runaway Rabbits or Li'l Liza Jane.

Not that I was going straight from Runaway Rabbit to Robert Vandall – I had recently played the Margaret Goldston Carnival Capers set, for example, which I understood to be somewhat entertaining but still a tricked-up exercise.

But I suppose it's all pedagogical music, when you think about it. The Bach Inventions and Sinfonias certainly are, Bach made it clear that these pieces were intended to teach musicians how to "sing the line" in two or three voices, and even virtuoso stuff like the Chopin Etudes are literally etudes.

I guess I want to know where you draw the line.

If we consider "real music" as anything you might want to listen to for its own sake, even if it weren't your own child playing it, Vandall passes.

If we consider "serious music" as a subset of "real music" in which studying the music yields an even greater appreciation of its qualities, Vandall probably doesn't.

Because the other thing I loved about those Vandall Preludes was that I could sit down and play them without any work –

Which I've been doing, off and on, for twenty-two years. ❤️

Sadly I don't think I have any conclusion to this post, except that I find the Vandall Preludes delightful and I understand why they aren't going to make it onto anybody's list of masterworks.

(I should note that my mother was all "wait you really want those" and I said "Mom, it's my birthday" in that way that kids do, and then I said "and if I don't get a copy somehow I will be forced to put them together in my own mind from memory" and then I sat down with my mom on speakerphone and played No. 6 mostly accurately.)

What I really need to do next is get a university library card so I can more seriously learn the Sinfonia, because there's nothing left for me to learn from Vandall except that the pieces work really well in a church setting.

WHICH I WILL DO

RIGHT NOW

(the library thing, not the church thing)

(church is Sunday)

AND TOMORROW I GET TO GET BACK TO MY MUSICAL. 🤩

p.s. I just checked the university library, they only have the urtext, this is the one situation in which you do not want the urtext, give me the revised Henle text with all of the fingerings "which draws upon all known sources and offers the best in 'instruction', especially with respect to the transmitted embellishment variants" please

p.p.s. I suppose one can get more than one piano book for their birthday, this is literally $25.95 and I think the house can afford it

p.p.p.s. I tried to interlibrary loan it anyway, might as well see how good ILL is